I didn’t plan to stay up late again, but here I am: sitting with the laptop screen angled away from Jasper’s bed, typing up a story that shouldn’t matter to me at all.
I couldn’t sleep, not even after reading six chapters of a racy “Beauty and the Beast” retelling I’d had on hold for weeks. Bev’s story seemed to bleed through the pages, so that I saw a house swallowed by honeysuckle instead of a castle covered in roses. I could almost hear her voice: the rhythm of it, the slight slur of the tobacco tucked in her lip.
Eventually I gave up. I opened the file I’d saved as “document 4,” buried in a series of folders with boring names, and typed it all out. I told myself that writing down somebody else’s story wasn’t as bad as making up my own, the way repeating a lie isn’t as bad as telling one; I told myself it was probably all horseshit, anyway.
Before I had gone back to my room, I’d asked Bev if she thought any of it was true. She tilted her chin one way, then the other. “Enough, I’d say.”
“Enough to what?”
“Enough to steer clear of those people. I don’t think this town is cursed by anything but coal, and I don’t know if all the Starlings are as bad as the first one was, but I’ll tell you something: I don’t trust the boy who lives there now.”
A little chill ran down my breastbone. I kept my voice light and curious. “Why’s that?”
Bev watched me closely when she answered. “His parents, they weren’t too bad. People will tell you all kinds of nonsense about them—Bitsy Simmons swears up and down they kept Siberian tigers, says she saw a big white thing in the woods one night—but I don’t believe it. The husband, he used to drive this beat-up old truck around, and he always waved when he passed the motel . . . Anyway, both of them turned up dead, eleven or twelve years ago. And the boy, he doesn’t even call the police, not for days.”
The chill settled low and heavy in my stomach. Bev continued, softly, “The animals had been at them so bad the coroner said he couldn’t tell what killed them in the first place. Hell, maybe they did keep tigers. But the coroner said that boy didn’t shed a tear the whole time. Just asked if he was finished yet, because it was past his suppertime.”
After a long, unpleasant silence, I managed a hoarse “Huh.”
Bev clicked the TV back on while I gathered up my books and junk mail.
She waited until I was halfway out her office door before she said, low and serious, “Stay away from Starling House, Opal.”
I crossed the parking lot with my neck bent and my hands shoved deep in my pockets. The mist was just slithering up the riverbank, pooling in the potholes and dips of the road.
It’s higher now. The streetlights have gone hazy and spectral, like low-hanging planets, and the fancy SUVs are animals crouched beneath them. By tomorrow, there will be little flecks of rust on the rims, and the fine leather seats will smell green and rotten.
Mom always said nights like this were unlucky. She wouldn’t place a bet or cut a deal until the mist burned off the next day.
I don’t believe in luck, but it was misty the night Mom died, and I sometimes think if it hadn’t been—or if she hadn’t had a few and announced, with her usual sincerity, that she was going to turn our lives around, or if I’d argued with her instead of pretending I still believed her, or if she hadn’t been driving that damn Corvette, or if that whatever-it-was hadn’t run across the road—well. Maybe she would be the one telling me to stay away from Starling House, instead of Bev.
And maybe she’d be right. I don’t much like the idea of cleaning the house of a woman who murdered her husband for his money, or a pair of women who kidnapped a kid, or a boy who looked down at his parents’ bodies with dry eyes. I have the sudden urge to take a shower, to scrub the dirt of Starling House out from under my nails and never go back.
A noise from the other side of the room: a high, wavering whistle. The note stops, rushes out, starts again. It sounds like a teapot just coming to boil, but it’s not: it’s a sixteen-year-old trying to breathe through bronchial tubes that are swelling shut.
The first time Jasper had an asthma attack I was twelve. It was three in the morning and Mom wasn’t in her bed and I didn’t want to call 911 because I knew ambulances were expensive. I turned all the faucets on as hot as they would go and shut the bathroom door. I held him in the steam—his ribs heaving, his muscles trembling under soft baby fat—until I realized he wasn’t going to get better and Mom wasn’t going to show up. When the dispatcher answered I said, calmly, “I don’t know what to do.”